


Leaning Together

by EnglishLanguage



Series: The Hollow Men (Exposition AU) [2]
Category: Tron (Movies), Tron - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Prostitution, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Anxiety Attacks, Asexual Sam Flynn, Asexual Tron, Dedicated pair, Depression, Exposition AU, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Underage Prostitution, Other, Past Rape/Non-con, Platonic Cuddling, Psychological Trauma, Queerplatonic Relationships, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 01:30:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18174062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnglishLanguage/pseuds/EnglishLanguage
Summary: There are things that Sam doesn't want to tell Alan. Tron intervenes.





	Leaning Together

**Author's Note:**

> "We are the hollow men  
> We are the stuffed men  
> Leaning together..."  
> \- T.S. Eliot

Tron is awake, but they’re both pretending that the program isn’t.

They’re both pretending Sam isn’t lurking at the entry to their bedroom, leaning against the doorframe in tense silhouette and struggling to get enough of a grip on himself to so much as move.

Tron will give Sam a limited time (how limited, Sam doesn’t know) to recover the warped and flaccid shreds of his dignity on his own. Ultimately, though, this whole _waiting thing_ is a downward spiral of game that Sam privately knows he can’t win, no matter how hard he tries. Either he gives in to Tron or he gives in to himself. Maybe he’ll fall down dead on the floor right here, right now. Wouldn’t that be perfect to shatter entirely once and for all, and never have to slowly fall apart again? Maybe he’ll turn around and lock himself into the bathroom with something sharp- even lethal, if he goes too far with it.

Most likely, he’ll just stand here looking stupid until the panic attack comes on in full, hyperventilation and everything.

So yeah- no matter what he does, he can't ever win.

Normally, that would infuriate him, but this situation isn’t _normal._ Sam knows that in the end, there is nothing- _nothing-_ that he can’t trust Tron with. However it is that he loses the game, Tron will make sure that Sam, somehow and in the end, wins.

He nestles the fluttering warmth of that knowledge into the hollow depths of his chest, despite that he's too awestruck by the magnitude of Tron's devotion to completely believe that it's real. He wants to believe in it, with all his heart, but it's all a ridiculous, messy, inexplicable tangle of love, and he can't bring himself to indulge it and let it swell. Not just yet. Before Tron, Sam was alone for so long. Now, he isn’t sure how to accept. He isn’t sure how to be accepted.

( _I_ _f he looks behind himself, he doesn't think there'll be anything there.)_

The thought crashes into him, white-hot with sharp friction and fear. It's a new panic, a new certainty that nothing is certain and nothing matters. Sam  _needs_ to smother his consciousness and snuff it out, because he’s trapped in a limbo of paralyzed terror- halfway to being a brain-dead vegetable- and there won’t be any peace until he goes all the way; until he rips his useless sentience to shreds. He doesn’t belong to this world of cardboard caricatures and scotch-taped edges, of blurring vision, of a foggy, sticky vacuum where the air should be.

There’s something paper-thin and waxy-transparent between his eyes and reality. Some flimsy barrier, some distortion, looms over him, ready to wrap over his face and suffocate him like a plastic bag. But if he holds completely still, he can see through it: He can see _Tron_.

When he tries to focus his eyesight, the effort is dizzying.

Sam gazes over the shape of the program resting on top of the bedsheets, curled around nothing in a soft curve of arms, thighs, and abdomen. Tungsten lighting from the doorway washes, golden, across Tron's bare torso and its broad planes of hard muscle and tendons- Sam thinks the color of the lighting is slightly wrong. Is the color wrong? _Is it?_

He doesn’t know.

A labyrinth of faint lines, radiant in alien white and blue, underscores the powerful contours of deltoids, biceps, brachioradialis, external obliques… and on down, like a diagram of musculature.

But he shouldn’t think about diagrams. He shouldn’t think about things-that-should-not-be-fake as being fake.

Tron is alive, isn't he? Sam thinks to check for breathing, but Tron is a program: he doesnt breathe, he ventilates. _U_ _nless_  he’s agitated, and then Tron has to self-regulate his intake and output of air like any user. Sam looks- Tron's chest isn't motionless in that ambiguous way that could be healthy or could be dead. It's steadily moving up and down, a little fast, a little desperate… But Tron is alive. _Alive, alive, alive..._

He’s solid, too, Sam thinks. There’s a steady, _solid_ strength coiled into the program on Sam’s bed, but the coiling in question is generous and slack, and Tron is near totally relaxed- peaceful and passive and limply sprawled into the give of the mattress. In all honesty, it’s like coming home to see a tiger, massive, broad, and very capable of committing quick homicide, lounging in one’s bedroom, ridiculously comfortable with the situation and perfectly amenable to being cuddled with if the owner of the room in question could only get over their user-glitched _crippling anxiety_.

But he can't get over it. The panic has long since leaked into his lungs, and it's… _difficult…_ to breathe around, to say the least. It gets even worse when that tattered piece of rationality takes hold in Sam’s brain, forcing him to remember that he can’t just inhale once and live on that. He has to exhale, too; he has to move. Sam shivers against a spasm of his lungs. What feels like an entire ton of air has been trapped inside him for far too long, and there’s no space left in the tension-strained hollow of his chest to take in more until he lets something go.

The stale air, carbon dioxide, forces out of him with a stuttered huff, and Tron… At the noise, the program cracks open one eye, the whites of it catching light in a thin, crescent glint across his cornea. 

“Sam.” They aren’t playing games anymore. “You’ve been standing there for…” Tron gives up; shakes his head with clear disapproval, but the action isn’t very effective- it's strangely, distantly adorable, really- seeing as it just burrows him further into the pillow. (Sam wants to laugh at that. He wants to dissolve into hysteria. He wants to do a lot of things, but those things just get lost in his head.) The sad thing is that Tron is was coded to monitor the world around him with a hyper-observant, thorough, near algorithmic tact that Sam is incapable of. It doesn’t take a genius to realize Tron probably recorded the duration of Sam’s nervous vigil down to the picocycle. That the program doesn’t even want to specify _what_ that duration was is concerning.

At least, it would be concerning if Sam could manage to be properly concerned about himself.

He jerks once- the tremor runs down from his shoulders to his lungs to the tips of his fingers. He has to talk _. Just talk._ “That long, huh?” There’s a lag between the action of speaking and Sam’s awareness of it. The connection from his brain to his body is blurred and backlogged with an uncanny distance.

The words themselves get caught up in the air, bloated and heavy and horrible and _loud_.

“You need to sleep.” Tron props himself up on one elbow, catching his jaw in a hand streaked with Watchet blue. Pale circuits veer across the curvature of his palm; they spill and divert down his wrist before angling up his arm to interlace into the sharp weave of luminescence on the program’s chest. It’s ironic, Sam thinks, that he has come to associate the icy coloring of Tron’s body with security and warmth, of all things.

In fact, what Sam wants most right now is to give in and burrow into the solid heat of Tron’s chest, but he can’t. He can’t bring himself to move; can’t even conceive the _possibility_ of movement. The epicenter of his fragile illusion-world is tethered to him, and if he moves now, it might tear apart under the stress. _Everything_ might shatter into _nothing_.

The neural impulse to shift his weight, unlock his muscles, and walk keeps shorting out in his skull.

(He feels it all fizzle- limping, shriveling- to an exhausted end in the frozen, broken chasm of his brain.)

“Sam?” Tron is sitting up, and Sam can’t understand when that happened or how he missed it, but his program is one worried thought away from slipping out of bed entirely. That’s not good. They shouldn’t be moving, and they shouldn't be disturbing the thick quiet; the apprehension... “Calm down, Sam. You’re over-processing things.”

True.

He deliberately shuffles his weight from his heels to the balls of his feet, every transfer slow and subtle agony on sensitive, creaking joints (not really creaking, but he swears he can feel the weight of his body sagging on top of delicate, brittle knees and ankles). One foot shifts a bit on the ground, and Sam’s heart _shrieks_ to a terrified halt, an inhale shudders to a rasping halt halfway down his throat, there are _knives_ stabbing through the soles of his feet...

(And again, his skin isn’t really splitting around the dry-ice cold of the floor, but Sam _feels_ it regardless.)

“ _User_.”

 _Tron._ Tron is speaking, Tron is still alive, so existence itself hasn’t disintegrated like wet paper. Sam's heart and lungs and entire chest convulse, coming to life again with a dull burn.

“Focus on me, Sam Flynn.” The program pats the sheets at his side. It’s a gesture that was created entirely by users- it's a gesture that Sam taught to Tron over so many nights convincing the program that, yes- in the user world, all programs need to sleep, including the champion of the Grid. And is that not fair proof that Sam exists; that his relationship with Tron exists?

He has to focus on Tron. “Yeah… Alright.” Sam forces himself into a jolting step forward before he can overthink anything else. Teeth clench around a short-circuit of spastic, chattering energy that courses through his jaw, and he’s suddenly tripping over nothing.

Tron catches him halfway, gripping Sam’s forearms with firm caution.

The program's hands are human-warm and alive, striped with longer bursts of unusual heat: one, narrow circuit down the inside curve of each finger. The coded lines scorch a sense of _reality-existence-presence_ into Sam’s wrists. His knees hit the edge of the mattress, and the mattress- pliant as it is- gives against his weight. Sam allows his own knees to buckle and collapses (in awkward sprawl; feet too haphazard to bear weight and elbows planted sharp on Tron’s thighs) against the program.

“By the users, Sam Flynn…” Sam can’t hear Tron’s grunt, but feels it lurch in Tron’s chest against the side of his face as the monitor’s body takes Sam’s weight, stops short, and compensates for it.

“I know. Heavy.” He excavates his elbows from Tron’s lap and tries to wriggle farther onto the bed, but there’s too much of him moving, and _not enough of him anchored_ … His lungs fail mid-inhale with a miserable, shivering wheeze. “Sorry.”

“When did the attack start?”

“Anxiety started early this week…?” The words spill out of him in a slur, like his lips are numb or maybe dead, and his tongue just a writhing, rotting chunk of muscle. “Wasn' _this_ bad for a week, jus’...” Just building up, slow and overwhelming. He gasps. “I knew ‘s gonna happen today. _Knew it._ ”

He’d woken up wrong. He’d woken up sane, but volatile, just waiting for it all to fall apart. It was that computer pop-up that’d finally set him off.

“I see.” Tron’s hands turn over someone's- _Sam's_ - arms. (This body does belong to him, and he can't forget that.) Sam knows what the program is looking for, and he knows that permission is being silently requested. He allows it.

Sleeves slide upward, over his forearms and past his elbows, up and up. Comparatively, it’s not that bad this time around: the skin is just red and raw, speckled with bright, crimson mottles that look like the beginnings of bleeding. His nails are ragged, bitten far enough down that his fingers sting with every nervous twitch. Most of the injuries are old, though. There are some silver-white scars that look like strips of stretched-out fabric, some splotches that are almost the color of his skin and almost purple. He hisses as Tron's fingers trail over the belly of his arm- there are a few layers of skin missing here and there, and physical contact against those areas feels like burning. Through his inspection, Tron never once lets go of Sam, and his touches comfort and aggravate in turns.

“Did you clean this?”

Sam’s eyes wander over to to the dark corner of the room- the curtains and window and sky outside look flat, two-dimensional. He gradually pulls his eyes back to the program; can’t bring himself to say yes, but manages to hum in confirmation.

He’s being moved now, back and forth at random and entirely limp- Tron is holding him up, manhandling the t-shirt off his body. Sam feels better immediately with it gone. The shirt was heavy cotton, soaked around the armpits with cold sweat and seemingly reeking of fast food and filth even though Sam hasn’t been anywhere today except home and work and back again.

Tron pulls him close before falling backward on the mattress with agile precision. Resultantly, Sam’s body is lugged forwards with far less grace and no lack of catching limbs on bed corners and edges. Tron tucks his chin and catches Sam’s eye where his sluggish, frozen corpse is trying to melt its face into the program’s abdomen. “So what was it that finally...?”

“Mm?”

The suggestion of agitation that rumbles beneath Tron’s ribs- too hefty and staggered to be a natural function of Tron’s faint ambient thrum- catches Sam off guard. It’s a credit to the scarred remnants of Rinzler in Tron’s code that the program, on the other hand, doesn’t react at all surprised by the reappearance of the sound, even as his words pick up the electronic edge of the growl. “You were just nervous before. What caused _this?_ What is it that’s worr-Rrying you?”

Well... the computer pop-up, sort of. He licks his lips and gathers a different answer right on the back of his tongue so that the sounds won’t escape when he tries to say them. “Alan.”

The words still seem so muffled, far away. Sam doesn’t know how much of that is because he’s still… drifting off somewhere else, slightly behind and to the left of where he thinks his mind usually sits. He doesn’t know how much of it is because he’s face-down in Tron’s ribs.

The program just wraps both legs behind Sam’s knees and _yanks_ until Sam’s properly positioned in the bed on his back, with Tron perched above him- twisted small to crouch between Sam’s legs and spread broadly to straddle Sam’s upper half with his arms. His head hangs low over Sam’s (centimeters between them). In short… Sam’s entire world is now made up of system monitor. There’s a question etched into the somber confusion knotted across Tron’s brow and in the terse, downwards quirk of his lips, but Sam _can’t focus_ beyond the soft press of knees against his inner thighs, the glaring warmth of circuited arms bracketing his head, the unusual pattern of Tron’s ventilation in uneven puffs against Sam’s face...

“Sam. I ca-an’t hear-rR-r you.”

“ _Alan.”_

Some thought process skids to a halt in Tron’s head, and the rest of the program stills with it. Rinzler’s snarl furls into silence, Tron’s elbows abruptly lock, and his eyes freeze to a halt staring directly into Sam’s... Tron shakes himself; runs sparks of energy down his circuits before folding himself onto elbows and forearms, finally resting his forehead against Sam’s with the slightest click of collision. (The morbid purr kicks up again with a stuttering crescendo uncomfortably similar to the sound of a rebooting computer.)

The way Tron is positioned over him, nothing lines up exactly: Tron’s eyes are level with some strip of skin around Sam’s eyebrows, the tip of his nose caresses against the side of Sam’s, and his tired sigh washes hot, scented metallic-sweet, into Sam’s nostrils. “A-aAlan_One.” Sam spasms with an involuntary shiver at the name, and Tron tightens his embrace; relaxes to drape his entire lower body over Sam’s like an oversized electric blanket. “Wh-hh-hat did he do?”

“It’s nothing he’s done, Tron. It’s…” There’s significant weight settled on Sam’s chest now, so when he breathes, he's forced to breathe slowly. It feels like oxygen finally seeps its way into his brain and the sheer relief of it collects behind his eyes, hot and wet and itching. “It’s something I’m afraid he’ll do. It’s me not _knowing_ what he’ll do; how he’ll react…” One drop of water streaks down his face, sliding to a halt at the corner of his jaw.

“How he’ll r-Rr-react to wwhat?”

He’s wrapped inside the great burrito of Tron. He doesn’t have to be afraid in here- not of the fractured, disordered world; not of _anything_. The clot of torrid distress scabbed in his chest loosens. His throat, and its lock on his ability to speak, also loosens. “To… You know what I am, Tron; I've told you about it. You know what I’ve done with myself, and maybe that’s…” His breath is choking him, and he spits an exhale against Tron’s chin. “Maybe that’s okay in the Grid, to make a living how you want, but it’s not the same for users. Prostitution is… Is… It’s wrong; even _you_ can’t deny that. More importantly, it isn’t the kind of thing that I can hide from people. It’s so obvious, man; everything I do is broken…”

_What if Alan already knows?_

He tries to curse. He sobs instead. “Tron, Alan already _knows_.”

“Alan knows?”

Alan is too friggin' perceptive. “Aw, man- he’s got to…”

“He doesn’t.” Tron’s arms relax, and the tautness in his chest releases synchronically; the firewall’s shuddering gnarl quiets into a tired, nearly inaudible whirr. He tucks his arms under Sam’s shoulders and rolls to his side with the heavy _fuff_ of ribs squashing crumpled sheets and air pushing out of lungs. Sam rolls with him, burrowing deeper between arms and the hard width of Tron’s chest. “If Alan_One knew, he would h-ave done somet-hing to help.”

Sam stifles a shiver against the program. “Wouldn’t’ve. I don’t deserve help.” He was so stupid as a kid, and he got himself _hurt_ because of it, but he just needed to live; to _eat..._

“Sam…” Tron’s fingers twine into his hair. Rinzler’s snarl has faded away completely, so the dark growl in Tron’s voice is entirely the program’s own gruffness: “You did what you had to.”

“I could’ve done better. I'm pathetic."

“No.”

“I…” His voice splinters with repressed sobs, and he needs to cry so badly that he might vomit from holding it back. “You know I can’t just believe that.”

“Then I’ll believe it for you, null unit. You’re not pathetic; you’re my _partner._ I fight for you.”

“You fight for the users.” He’s digging his nails into the skin of Tron’s chest (the symbol emblazoned across it pulses warmly against his fingertips), and it has to hurt, but the program doesn’t complain.

Tron sniggers softly, sadly. “You _are_ a user.” With the back of his untrapped hand, Tron nudges Sam’s face upwards, forcing eye contact. “And I fight for you in specific, Sam Flynn. It’s a primary directive, and nothing will ever undo that.”

“How do you know? How do you know that… that _nothing_ will ever…?” He’s not just asking Tron. He’s also asking Alan, who is not here and can't represent himself, except for the vague shape of him imitated in Tron’s face and body.

For a second, Tron is silent. Sam dislodges his chin from where it’s hooked above the sharp angle of the Tron's wrist and ducks back into the program’s abdomen, where everything is pale skin and lines of light like a living microchip. He sees the Grid in the form of Tron's body, and can almost forget that he’s in the user world, this  _fake_ world that likes to come apart right under his feet... 

“You are Sam Flynn," Tron decides. "And I love Sam Flynn- every part of him; every directive, every subroutine.” It's that simple.

"I'm not a program, Tron."

Languorous, Tron arches his back in a stretch, pulling away from Sam only briefly before molding back around Sam's body with a low snort. "Really,  _Flynn_? I've had you identified as a data pusher since we met, and you only correct me now?"

"Hilarious." It kind of is, but Sam can't bring himself to laugh at it; can't just bypass his insecurities as easy as that. “Tron, even… back then? Would you have loved me when I… when I was still…?”

“ _Yes_.”

“What if I can’t stop?” What if he sold himself to live so often that he feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t continue? What if he hates sex, but needs it to feel like he’s still breathing; like he can still take care of himself? What if, one day, he just goes out on the streets again and…

“That won’t change _anything_ , Sam.” Tron’s arms tighten around him, constricting Sam’s heaving body and tugging his head closer. “It won’t change anything for Alan_One, either. I promise.”

The next sob slumps over in Sam’s throat; when it finally leaks out of his mouth, it’s nothing more than a thin whimper.

Tron’s fingers finally shift from their position tangled in Sam’s hair, tracing slow lines down the curve of his scalp… then abruptly to the side, and up again at right angles. Tracing patterns of circuitry against his skin... The program’s question is hesitant, quiet enough that Sam almost doesn’t hear the beginning of it. “Sam? What… made you start thinking about this?”

“Dumb computer pop-up.” Sam tries to laugh, but the sound is feeble and watery. “Porn. It’s pathetic.” He’s a prostitute, and he’s developing a debilitating fear of sex. _Yep- he's c_ _ompletely pathetic._

Tron bumps the top of Sam’s head with the jaw-edge of his chin, disapproving. “You are _still_ not pathetic.”

“Sure,” he croaks. “But if… if I’m going to keep… k-keep freaking out about stuff like this, I can’t- I don’t think I… there’s no way to hide it. Alan’s gonna ask something stupid about my love life and I-I-I’ll just… panic, or something.” He works one hand out from in between his body and Tron’s; wipes tears away against his knuckles. “He deserves to know, right? He’s _kinda_ like my dad.”

Alan Bradley is the closest thing Sam had to a parent after Kevin left, even if Sam never told Alan a thing about what was going on in his life; even if Sam fed him lie after lie and didn't let Alan interfere. Even if Alan was never able to do anything to help. Sam owes a deep, if basic, loyalty to the older programmer, and the thought of _continuing_ to lie to Alan about everything churns his gut into a cyclone of sweltering guilt. 

Tron hums contemplatively. "Alan helped to take care of you. And he is my Creator. Regardless, you’ve made it clear that I don’t owe anything to him.” Tron’s thumb brushes down the spine of Sam’s neck, sketching a narrowly jagged path imitative of Tron’s own circuitry. “Alan_One is important, but you said that I belong to myself. Sam- you belong to yourself, as well.”

“So…” He squirms forward; nuzzles himself more firmly against the linear entirety of Tron’s body. “Don’t tell him?”

“Tell him if you want to, but not because you have to. It will all be fine, whatever you choose.”

The air trapped between Sam’s mouth and the indent of Tron’s clavicles is starting to smell of a stagnant warmth anyways, so he tilts his head back from the length of the program’s throat to breathe and to speak clearly. “You’re sure?”

“On one condition.” Sam hums- half-grunts, really- in curious acquiescence. “Tell me before you tell him?” Heck, and Tron’s so _uncertain_ about the request, too…

“Okay.” With a disgusting sound, he sniffles and sucks a gob of snot up his nose. “Yeah, I can do that.” Tron relaxes with relief, patting softly at the nape of Sam’s neck in gentle approval. 

“Tron, I’m… tired, though. Can we sleep?”

He feels the program sigh as Tron readjusts his grip. “ _Now_ he wants to sleep.” Tron’s voice is strained, trying a little too hard to switch gears and change the topic.

“Shut up.” The anxiety has petered out into a low-grade throbbing right behind Sam’s heart; he’s exhausted and defenseless without any semblance of a verbal filter, and he really can’t do this anymore. Tron is curled around him like a heater and a shield, one hand splayed over Sam’s back and the other brushing across the base of his skull. He's safe, for now- Tron will protect him, and they can deal with this tomorrow. Sam closes his eyes and wills himself to fall asleep.

 

 


End file.
